Tilley's 3 Piece Dilley

The One and Only Theological Impasse

by Dr. Jeff Mirus, June 26, 2009

An excerpt from Catholic Culture.

In his presidential address to the annual meeting of the Catholic Theological Society of America on June 7th, Terrence Tilley discussed “Three Impasses in Christology”. Tilley is Chair of the Theology Department at Jesuit-run Fordham University in New York. For Tilley, a theological “impasse” is a theological problem which admits of no easy solution, in which two or more sides harden their positions against one another to the point of stalemate, thereby preventing theological progress. The catch in Tilley’s argument is that he identifies one of these “sides” as the Magisterium of the Church!

The Problem of Fidelity

The exclamation point at the end of that last sentence may not be justified for such a predictable statement. Tilley’s address exemplifies exactly the kind of thorough-going rejection of the Magisterium which we have come to expect in the Western Catholic theological mainstream. The tactic is always the same: Identify the Vatican as simply one of many voices to be heard and then, if it chooses to act decisively, dismiss it as authoritarian and obscurantist. The mind boggles that this attitude can still be found at the core of a presidential address to the CTSA after so many years of utter failure on the CTSA’s part to contribute to any sort of authentically Catholic theological renewal.

That Tilley is still occupied with the going out of business sale at the same old theological store is immediately obvious from the examples he uses in his introduction to illustrate what he means by an impasse hardening into a stalemate. To set the stage for understanding the seriousness of it all, he identifies three larger ecclesial impasses before moving on to his specific Christological concerns. These are:

• ”a shrinking and in some places demoralized presbyterate that cannot be enlarged significantly under present rules”
• ”a laity that loves the church but has stopped listening to the bishops”
• ”a hard-working and loyal body of religious women who are disgusted and discouraged by repeated investigations of religious life and attempted reversals of self-governance”

Read the rest of Dr. Jeff Mirus's article (here)
Photo is of Terrence Tilley